War Movies

Best war series ever: Rick Jason (left) and Vic Morrow in Combat!BACK TO THE FRONT LINES
By TOM SOTER
from MOVIE TIMES, 1999

War movies are back. The success of Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan, has almost singlehandedly revived a once-popular genre. Ever since All Quiet on the Western Front nabbed an Oscar as Best Picture in 1930, war pictures have allowed audiences and critics to have their blood and deplore it, too. The most popular battle flicks – The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Longest Day (1962), The Guns of Navarone (1964), Patton (1970) – show “guts and glory” heroism, as ordinary people overcome extraordinary circumstances. And for moralists, the films have an added bonus: they offer bloody action as an excuse to rail against the ugliness and depravity of armed conflict.

Some say that such pictures fell on hard times because of an anti-Vietnam backlash. But now, the war is back. This December, director Terence Malick offers The Thin Red Line, his take on the Pacific conflict. That will be followed by U-571 and Thunder Below, two submarine stories; Combat!, with Bruce Willis, from the hit ‘60s TV series; and With Wings of Eagles, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It’s no surprise that WWII is the conflagration of choice in all these films: unlike the enemies in Vietnam, the Nazis were clearly evil and the issues much simpler. Or, as a film student once put it, “World War II? Wasn’t that the war fought in black and white?”